OTOY Forums

Hello everyone. I've been following for a year and yesterday decided to install and try it out for the first time. I was up until 2am playing with Octane. I'm completely blown away and will adopt it as my main render engine - sometime soon.
[My rig: intel i7 3970 - 16 gig ram - gtx 670.]

A couple of questions but first I have a problem concerning black frames upon output.

1. I tried two scenes last night, one light - interior hallway - that rendered fine in both the live renderer & C4D's native viewport. The second was a much heavier scene with animated elements & both viewers go black & refreshing them is a hit or miss. I wondered if this might be scene specific or have other run into a similar issue.

2. Unclear about the use of native materials. I loaded a scene with native material to see if it would render and it did. Are native materials supported or should I always build in Octane materials? Also, do some of the c4d's shaders, layer shader, filter, colorizer ect..., work?

3. The shaders are a bit confusing to me. Some check boxes are ticked that don't seem to have any effect when building a material. I tried to build a simple chrome shader with anisotropy but had no luck.

Excuse the length - a bit exited and anxious to get fluent. Please direct me to any links that can help my concerns. Cheers.

Hi,

You may find the standalone and c4d manuals useful:

http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Standalone/
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Cinema4D/

1) Keep an eye on your GPU memory usage (listed at the bottom of the render during rendering then at the top once render hits 100%, in the live viewer), if the scene has very heavy geometry with large textures you could be running out of VRAM.
The memory is listed as mem:used/available/total of card.
If the used plus available is far below the total, then some other software is consuming VRAM (like the OS or C4D) therefore leaving less for octane.

2) It's always best to use octane materials.
There is some compatibility/conversion http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Cinema4D/?page_id=629

3) Learning the way octane works is usually more simple in the standalone, then it's generally easy to transfer to a plugin, all you need to do is find where all the settings/options etc are.

For a simple chrome material use a glossy material with full/white specular, black diffuse, zero or very little roughness. Then tweak the index as desired.

The octane materials are what they are, and you cannot disable/enable the different parts of them. If you need no specular you will need to set it to zero rather than untick it for example. They don't have the ability to be tweaked in this manner since they are not a composite of the individual bits/passes but rather a complex material with all these parameters as input.

I hope that makes sense.

Thanks
Chris.